Tapered containers, namely thin walled plastic containers, bowl shaped containers and glass containers are widely used in the food industry. In particular, edible oil products such as margarine and whipped toppings are currently packaged in bowl shaped containers. These containers must be packaged for transit in a multipack format. The multi-pack format requires outer packing support for loading onto pallets. Full corrugated boxes are normally used to package bowl shaped containers for transit.
There is an ongoing trend to reduce total package content by 10%. Currently, two U.S. states have enacted laws requiring 10% package reductions.
Current attempts at package reductions merely replaces the corrugated boxes with trays on which the containers are nested and then shrink wrapping the unit. However, a problem is created regarding the structural integrity of the trays. Such trays are generally not self-supportive when loaded onto pallets resulting in the pallet loads being unstable. With unstable pallet loads, there is a higher rate of damage during transit.
Shrink wrapping is not energy efficient. Extensive energy is required to heat the wrap. Much of the energy is lost as heat.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,826,357 and 4,998,615 are examples of packaging which addresses the structural problem. Dividers or stacker elements are required to be used in order to improve the stackability of the packages. By adding dividers and stacker elements, significant improvements in packaging reductions cannot be achieved.
Canadian Patent No. 1,191,819, describes a multipackage assembly is described. The packages are sandwiched between two sheet of cardboard and held together by strips of a frangible adhesive. This type of packaging has met the requirements of reduced packaging. However, this type of packaging is only suitable for regular parallelepiped cartons. Tapered containers packaged in this type of packaging are flimsy and do not handle and stack well.
In still other types of packaging such as described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,787,509, yogurt containers are wrapped with a single sheet of cardboard and attached to the sheet by a frangible adhesive. This type of packaging is only capable of packaging a small number of containers in a single package.